


walk together with our hands up in the sky

by alchemystique



Category: The Punisher (TV 2017)
Genre: F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-19
Updated: 2017-11-19
Packaged: 2019-02-04 11:25:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,351
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12770037
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alchemystique/pseuds/alchemystique
Summary: Frank and Karen in the aftermath.





	walk together with our hands up in the sky

**Author's Note:**

> title is from “two high” by moon taxi. the flowers weren't actually meant to be a running theme through this but it happened anyway so
> 
> spoilers through 1x13 of the punisher

>

He’s standing in her office, with a neatly trimmed goatee and a head of curly hair piled high on his head, and he’s laughing at something Rachel from sports is saying, his lips stretched wide, his teeth a burst of white against the sunlight shining through the window, and it’s been three months and he’s still a wanted man and all Karen can think is _oh thank god._

He glances up, catches her eye, and Karen’s breath catches in her throat. She’s seen him beaten, tired, hiding, terrified and bloody and angry, she’s seen him fight a smile and talk of the terrible greatness of love, but she’s never seen him like this, not a visible scratch or bruise and not even trying to hide how happy he is to see her.

Karen hefts her bag higher on her shoulder, regrets it as she watches the way his eyes dart towards it, a new one without a nice big bullet hole through the bottom of it, regrets the flicker of momentary hurt and confusion it causes as he watches her walk towards him. 

There are flowers on her desk, bright and colorful, the salvia almost a dead match for the blue of his button up, and Karen barks out a laugh as he straightens from a lean, standing to attention like he might have done years ago for a commanding officer, ignores the occupied desk on her right as she bowls into him, arms tight around him, nose digging into his neck as his arms wrap right back around her.

_Frank_ , she thinks, doesn’t say aloud because the city thinks he’s run off, or he’s underground, or he’s dead and someone buried the story. (Maybe that had just been Karen.)

Her laugh turns half sob and she can feel his breath on her ear, his pulse under the fingers she’s got wrapped around his neck, the warmth of his hand at her back, and they stand like that for too long, long enough that when Karen finally disentangles herself and shoots a glance at Rachel the other woman is carefully not making eye contact, focused far too carefully on her notes to be paying any attention at all to the words.

“Surprise,” he says, wry grin on his face, and Karen fights the urge to press her fingers into the visible laugh lines, to wrap him back into her and never let go.  


“What...” There’s no good way to ask the question with an audience, especially one as intent as theirs, still carefully staring at the same section of notes she’d been studying a minute ago.  


“Figured I’d let you know I hadn’t bought the farm.” She rolls her tongue over her teeth and has to close her eyes to keep from shooting a look at Rachel, but he’s sold it, the ironic ring in his voice and the roll of his shoulders playing it off like a joke between two people who haven’t spoken in a while.  


“Coffee?” she asks, because she doesn’t want to be near him for another second with watchful eyes on them and because her office is suddenly stifling in his presence and he is alive and smiling at her as he nods his head.  


She leaves the flowers, ignores Rachel’s voice when she calls out “It was nice to meet you, Pete!”, notes his proximity as he falls into step beside her, waits until they’ve turned the corner and are out of sight of the office before she presses her shoulder into his just to feel him press back.

“This is a new look for you, _Pete_.”  


He laughs. It’s one of those dorky, too high laughs, almost a giggle for the way it makes her momentarily forget what he sounds like yelling, and knocks his elbow against hers. “Hipster wasn’t working for me, I figured I’d give the Tony Stark a try.”

“It’s...not a terrible look,” she tells him, and then darts her gaze to the ground, feeling her cheeks go red. “You look good, Frank.”  


He coughs to cover up the awkward silence, and Karen thinks of his forehead pressed to hers, thinks of the things they never have to say, wishes she could just say what she wants to and not have to worry about the consequences. Thinks “ _You’re important to me, Frank_.” and hopes the gentle brush of her pinky along the side of his hand gets the point across.

They go to a greasy diner down the block, sliding into opposite sides of a booth, and Karen drinks him in, ignores the way he does the same and how it makes her chest tight. 

“How have you been?” he asks, and then frowns into the newly poured cup of coffee.  


“Did you really come to my office to hand deliver flowers and shoot the shit with me?”   


He blinks, and rolls his tongue over his teeth, a familiar tic in his jaw that Karen thinks suits him. “Yeah.” He nods his head, tilting it just slightly, and god, it’s so fucking familiar, it’s so fucking _Frank_ , and despite how much they’ve come to care for each other, it’s always been hard for her to imagine a world where they’re just...hanging out. No ulterior motive between them. “Yeah.”

“Okay.”  


Frank’s gaze holds steady on her face until the waitress returns with the plate of eggs and sausage he’d ordered, eyes flickering from her face to her jawline, running over her cheeks, and the hair curling over the scar on her forehead from the one scrape that didn’t quite heal properly. “Okay,” he parrots back at her, and Karen barks out a laugh, kicks at his foot under the table, laughs louder when he captures her ankle between his boots and just holds it there. 

“I missed you.” Her voice is whisper soft but he hears her all the same, ducking down towards his plate even as he continues to stare at her beneath the line of his brow.   


“Yeah, me too.”  


\------

Pete Castiglione is a hit at the office, dropping by with flowers, and a coffee each for Karen and Rachel once a week, evading the ever suspicious Ellison as best he can, arguing with Rachel about the Jets and reminding her after the World Series that the Dodgers were _Cap’s_ team ( _”Don’t fuckin’ matter that they moved, or that he’s on the lam_.) and Karen takes it in stride. 

It’s almost as if he doesn’t want to be alone with her - not really, truly alone, even when Rachel gives Karen the side eye and closes the door behind her when she heads out midday (”I’m taking a _long_ lunch,” she says, with zero subtlety, and Frank stares at his shoes for ten minutes while Karen taps out a few shitty sentences at her keyboard.)

They go to diners, and coffee shops, or they walk along the crowded streets, and Karen tries not to take offense. He’s... healing, trying to deal with his losses, and his life, and Karen wants to be there for him whatever way she can, even if that means she has to ignore the tender looks he’ll shoot between his lashes when he thinks no one is looking.

She starts researching flower meanings, and then laughs at herself in her quiet, dimly lit apartment when they all mean something she’s pretending not to hope for.

She calls him from a dive bar, five drinks in and already dangerously close to drunk, when she finds out Matt is alive.

He’s in her phone as Pete C, and her finger hovers over his name for a good five minutes before she presses dial, but he picks up halfway through the first ring, voice gruff and scratchy like maybe she’s woken him, and before she can hang up the phone, text him something stupid like _sorry, butt dial_ , he says “Karen?” and there’s an edge of fear in his voice that makes her blink away some of the alcohol. 

“Can you come get me?”  


It’s a stupid thing to ask, an even more stupid thing to hope for, but she can hear him shuffling around, hear the shift of fabric and the distinct sound of a zipper being pulled, a belt being tightened. “Where are you?” 

She rattles off the crossroads, staring into her empty scotch glass while he hums, and then “Frank, its - I’m okay. I’m not -- I just...”

“I’ll be there soon.”  


He saunters into the bar less than ten minutes later, his hair a little wild and his shirt only halfway tucked into his jeans, looking rumpled and concerned and god, there are things she thinks about when she looks at him that she has no place thinking, but she thinks them anyway and he has to know, he has to _know_.

He slides into the stool next to her and drinks the rest of her half finished beer while he stares at her. “I’m sorry,” she tells him, a little wobbly, definitely a little drunk, and he grimaces. 

“You don’t gotta apologize, c’mon. You don’t gotta do that with me.”  


Throat tight and blinking back tears, she nods, and leans into his space, spinning to press her knee into his. It’s a relief, knowing that she could say anything to him and he’d be okay with it. Anything except what she wants to say. _You mean something to me, Frank._

He wraps an arm around her waist when she hoists herself from her stool, scoffs when she reaches for her wallet and shakes his head at her with an amused eyeroll as he throws down too much money on the bar, and leads her out to a flashy looking muscle car she can’t decide whether to laugh about or scold him for stealing. 

It takes some maneuvering on his part to get her in the bucket seat, and more to get her out when he parks it a block away from her apartment building, Karen going straight from drunk to tired with the rumble of the engine and the Springsteen playing softly from the tape deck.

“Where’d you steal this monstrosity from?” she asks him as he gets an arm under her knees, and selfishly she hopes she seems drunker than she really is.   


“Bought it fair and square, ma’am,” he tells her, a hint of cheek in his voice. “C’mon, I am not carrying you up three flights of goddamn stairs.”  


She huffs and rolls her shoulders back, turns her head to assist him in getting her out of his car only to be confronted by the too-close line of his jaw, the broken bend of his nose. 

He’s got two fingers in the backs of the shoes she’d kicked off, and her purse secured under his arm, she’s curled up in the jacket she’d found on the floor of the passenger seat, and it strikes her how very cozy this all is, how very domestic Frank has always been, how unashamed he is with _taking care_ of people.

Karen hums ‘Born to Run’ up the stairs and down her hallway, slightly louder with every step because it seems to both amuse and annoy him and she’s one of maybe three people in the world who finds comfort in the fact that Frank can feel both those things. 

It doesn’t strike her until she’s curled onto her couch with a glass of water in her hand, Frank hovering above her, unsure, that he hasn’t been back to her apartment since he gave her those white roses. 

When she pats the empty space beside her, he falls into it without hesitation, which doesn’t help Karen at all but it’s nice, all the same.

“You wanna tell me what sorrow’s we’re drinkin’ away tonight?”  


It’s easier for her to say to him than she’d expected, considering she’s been telling herself all night and it hurts worse each time. “Matt’s alive.”

His sharp glance is another thing Karen pretends not to read into. “It’s been... it’s been a _year_ , you know? We put an empty casket in the ground. We mourned him. We moved on and... and he was my friend, at least, even if the rest of it was a mess.”

The hum, low in his throat, is enough acknowledgement for her to continue. 

“Jesus, Frank, it took less time for _you_ to reach back out, and I told you to your face you were --.” Here she pulls in a shaky breath, scoots her ass against the cushions until she’s facing him. “I’m glad he’s not dead but...”  


They sit in silence, for a long time, long enough that Karen finishes up her water, watches him as he quietly stands and reaches for the glass, fingers curled around hers until she relinquishes it and watches him go to refill it.

When he sits back down and places the glass back in her hands, she’s certain he’s closer to her than he was the first time. “You still love him?”

“No.” The look he gives her tells her he doesn’t believe her. “Maybe. Yes. I... he...” _He’s important to me_ , she almost says, but it feels wrong in her mouth. “We always loved parts of each other, you know? The good parts, and we always pretended there were no bad parts. When I was around him, I was always so...” She presses her fingers into her thigh, swallows around a lump in her throat. When she glances back up at Frank he’s holding himself very still. “I was so lonely.”  


He blinks back at her, understanding in his gaze. His head bobs: up, down, up, and when she slides her feet across the space between them, tucking her toes under his thigh, his hand curls around her ankles, warm and unwavering. 

“I used to see Maria,” he tells her, head tilted up toward the ceiling. “Flashes of - memory and shit I made up in my head, and she... she was always there when I couldn’t handle my shit.” Karen listens, careful and still. “She was home, you know? Not this country, not New York, not that house we made together. All the pieces of her, all the things that made her _Maria_ , she was...” He’s talked about his family before - it was what had forged that trust between them, what had opened Karen’s eyes to who Frank Castle really was, but this is different, not some anecdote about his life before, this is... “She’s gone now.”  


“I’m sorry, Frank.”  


“ _Don’t_.” Around the lump in his throat, he swallows and squeezes her ankle. “Don’t be sorry. I... I gotta be okay with that.”  


“Are you? Okay with it?”  


When he turns to look at her this time, his finger tapping out a rhythm over the top of her foot, his pursed lips are answer enough even as he searches her gaze. “I’m tryin’ to be.”

\------

“Karen,” Foggy says, arms wide as he smiles at her, and Karen darts forward to give him a quick hug. “Karen, who is this Pete guy and when can I meet him?”

Karen shoots a look around Foggy at Rachel, who is carefully not making eye contact, and then glares at the bouquet of irises and daffodils on her desk. “Oh, he’s just - he’s a friend.”

“A friend who’s been bringing flowers by the office and charming your staff for months now? Karen, I hate to break it to you, but dudes aren’t that subtle. And you’re... well, you’re you, aren’t you.”  


She distracts him with a story about Daredevil that Ellison has assigned her, knowing it’ll rile him up enough for him to excuse himself, and she feels bad about it, she does, she misses Foggy and she wishes it were easier for them to just be like they used to be, but it’s not easy, it’ll never be easy, and despite the fact that the rest of the world can’t seem to recognize Frank Castle because he’s got a _goatee,_ Karen knows it won’t fool Foggy for a second.

She can’t decide whether she’s more terrified of his anger, or of his disapproval. 

When Frank knocks on her door that night she’s so busy thinking of what apologetic text to send Foggy that she barely glances through the peephole before letting the door swing wide, still in the barely there shorts and tee she'd thrown on after her shower, and she’s halfway down the hall when she realizes his footsteps aren’t following after her.

He looks guilty when she turns to look at him, eyes darting up to just above her head, and Karen excuses herself to go put pants on.

He’s adjusting the heat on her burners when she brings it up, stir fry sizzling in the pan as she hikes herself up onto the countertop. “You’ve gotta cut it out with the flowers.”

Back going stiff, he eyes the timer on the oven. “You don’t like ‘em?” His voice is careful and quiet, free of any intonation.

“Of course I like them, Frank, don’t be stupid. But everyone thinks you’re trying to get into my pants and that’s the only reason you bring them. _Foggy_ came by the other day and -.”  


“That what you think, Ms. Page? That I’m --?”  


“Don’t be ridiculous, I know you’re not --.”

He cuts her off, dropping the spoon against the side of the pan, sliding toward her, caging her in with a hand on either side of her legs, fingers stretched wide across the counter. “And what if I was? That’d be ridiculous? Man like me bringin’ flowers to a woman like you?”

“You know that’s not what I meant,” she whispers across the space between them, his breath fanning out over her lips, thumbs sliding hesitantly over the sides of her thighs. “You know it’s not.”  


She tries to get closer, to lean down and press her forehead against his, to reach for him, but he’s already gone, nearly knocking into the kitchen island before he spins on his heel. “I gotta go.”

“Frank, don’t --.”  


“You take care, yeah?”  


He’s gone before Karen has even had time to pull herself off the counter.

\------

She signs for the pot of orchids on a Saturday morning a week and a half later, fingers sliding along the delicate petals as she places them on the kitchen island. She doesn’t have to look this one up, not like the others, doesn’t have to yank out the book hidden under her bed, the one filled with pressed flowers on the appropriate pages. 

It’s the longest she’s gone without seeing Frank in months, but it’s nice to know she hasn’t scared him straight back into killing a whole bunch of people and getting _himself_ killed in the process. 

She spends the day staring at crime scene photos of a hit on one of the Gnucci boys, ignoring the growing pit in her stomach and wondering what Ellison would do if she told him she wanted off Crime, wanted to try her hand at the Relationship section. 

She laughs to herself when she thinks of the kind of headlines she’d have. So You’re Dating A Vigilante. How To Tell The Guy You’re Dating Is In Love With A Ninja Assassin. What To Do When You Might Be In Love With a Murderer. How To Help Your Guy Get Over His Dead Wife. Then she pulls out the flower book and stares at it for a while just to drive herself a little crazy.

She ignores three calls from Matt, and one from Foggy, and pops open a bottle of scotch around 11. 

The funny thing about spending so much time staring at crime scenes the last few years is she’s kind of numb to the gore, so when Frank stumbles into her apartment after kicking the door down, somewhere past midnight, painting her hallway wall red as he slides against it, her first thought is about how much it’s gonna cost her to fix the damn thing.

“We gotta go, Karen,” he says, and he’s beat bloody, one cheek swollen, a gash in his arm. “Karen, we gotta got out of here _now_.”  


She doesn’t really question it. He’ll explain it to her, she knows that much, but there’s an urgency in his voice and his eyes and in the tremble of his bloody knuckles that gets her on her feet in a moment, sliding into her bedroom to gather up her bag and throw on a pair of shoes. 

It’s not until they’re in the safety of a beat up Buick, careening down the highway, the copper stench of blood filling her nostrils, that Frank breaks the silence. 

“Wasn’t sure you were paying attention to the flowers that much,” he says, fingers tap - tap - tapping over the steering wheel. Karen gives him a confused look before she remembers the book open near the photos strewn across her living room floor.   


“I wasn’t sure I was meant to,” she tells him, and he chuffs out a laugh, unfurls a fist from around the wheel and reaches out for her hand, curling it into his own.   


“Gotta work on our communication.”  


“Or maybe you could rely less on cryptic Victorian courting rituals.”  


Frank hums delightedly, squeezes her hand in his own, and Karen thinks that maybe her world has been rocked so many times that now it just feels like a comfortable shift, like the world tilted on it’s axis but gravity keeps her steady. She wonders when Frank became _gravity_ for her. 

(Sometime after _please_ , but long before _spare some change_.)

He’s lost enough blood to be a little loopy by the time they get to the safe house nestled in the woods, and he leans heavily into her side, the bulk of him pressed against her while she struggles to get them up the sloping hill. She’s more grateful than surprised when Foggy and Matt both come rushing out of the cabin and down the stairs.

The cabin is almost _cozy_ , an old couch draped with heavy blankets, a fire stove blissfully unlit in the heavy summer heat, gauzy curtains covering the windows, and Karen takes it in as a third man bursts through the door behind her, grumbling about hero types as Matt and Foggy unload Frank onto the couch.

The stranger moves to lean over Frank, a hefty looking first aid kit in his hand, and Foggy and Matt turn to look at her. 

“What the hell is going on?” There’s a tic in Matt’s jaw that Karen can’t figure as she and Foggy both blurt the question out at the same time, but no one answers her, and she’s about to open her mouth to explain the situation when Frank seems to come back to himself somewhat. 

“Fisk. Karen, what does Fisk want with you?”  


The room erupts into chaos, and Karen excuses herself to work through the not-terribly-mild panic attack Frank’s words cause.

\------

Frank’s voice is soft, and the man patching him up is listening intently, when Karen has recovered enough to be remotely useful, but she stops just beyond the corner to listen to them speak for a moment. 

“...shit, Frank, you ever think maybe you’re attracted to danger?”  


“C’mon man, it ain’t like that.”  


“You tellin’ me you wouldn’t take a bullet for that woman? Cause you’ll definitely take a knife. Got hard evidence right here.”

“Took the bullets before too.”  


They both huff out pained laughter. 

“She means somethin’ to me, Curt. She... Jesus, Curt, Karen’s the most important thing I got.”

“I guess I should stock up my field kit, then.”  


“You don’t gotta do that.”  


“Yeah. Yeah I do.”  


Karen waits half a minute before she turns the corner to join them, and Frank’s friend rises, wiping his hands off on a towel before he reaches a hand across the edge of the couch. “Curtis Hoyle.”

Karen shakes the hand without much thought for the blood staining it. “Karen Page.”

“And I’m Santa Claus,” Frank mutters, but without much bite, and Curtis pretends not to notice the hand Karen drops to his shoulder, or the way he leans into the touch.   


“I’m just gonna let you two have a minute,” Curtis mutters, more to himself than anything else because Karen is already scrambling over the back of the couch, watchful of the bandage on Frank’s arm and she curls her legs under her. Matt and Foggy have disappeared, and she’s glad of it, for the moment.   


“Red seems to think you got a price on your head because you worked the case with Nelson and Murdock.” He still says _Mur_ dock like it’s two words, rolling them over his tongue with derision, and Karen can’t help the small smile that blooms on her face as he presses his nose into her shoulder. It should feel strange, pressed close to him while he practically nuzzles against her, but now that they’ve at least made a poor attempt to acknowledge what’s going on between them Frank has certainly wasted no time in accepting it.  


“That’s not why.”  


“Figured as much.”

“Matt and Foggy - if they’re part of this they should know. But they won’t be happy about it.”  


“Well I’m _morally repugnant_ ,” he tells her, like he’s quoting someone. “Think I can handle it.”  


“Yeah.”  


“You need a minute?”  


“No,” she tells him, her hand furling and unfurling on her thigh. “Yes.”  


“I can wait,” he tells her, and lifts his face from her shoulder, leaning back against the couch and gathering her hand in his. Her palm is sweaty, but he doesn’t seem to notice. “Curt pumped me full of pain meds, though, so you wait too long and you’ll be telling your deep dark secrets to my snores.”  


And that’s it, isn’t it? The way he can just make light of something she’s been terrified to tell for years, the way he knows exactly what she needs, exactly what -

“I killed his man. They were trying to get to Nelson and Murdock, trying to... I was never really sure what they were trying to do. He kidnapped me. Took me out to some abandoned building to scare me, and when that didn’t work...”  


“He would have killed you.”  


“Yes.”  


There’s no judgement in his eyes, nothing to make her believe she was wrong for doing what she’d done. That should scare her. It should make her want to run in the opposite direction. 

She shifts to press her knees into his thigh.

“I don’t know how he knows,” she tells him, pulling in a sharp breath, and her chest feels tight again.  


“Hey. Listen. Karen, listen.” There’s a softness to his voice sometimes, something that settles into her bones, and it’s like that now, as he ducks his head to hold her gaze. “Me and Fisk? We got unfinished business of our own. He’s not gonna touch you. I won’t let him. Murdock won’t let him. Hell, give Nelson some spandex and he’ll probably try to join in.”  


The sharp burst of laughter cuts through the anxiety rising within her. “That’s not funny,” she chides him, and he shrugs.

“It’s a little funny.”  


_You **mean** something to me_, she thinks, as Foggy and Matt burst back into the cabin, arguing between themselves, and Karen knows they haven’t spoken this much since before Matt came back. She can’t help but feel glad of this, even if they’re pretending not to give a damn about each other at the moment. 

Foggy gets one look at Karen’s hand curled in Frank’s, blinks, calls out “ _Pete Castiglione_ , really?” and spends the next thirty minutes yelling at her, instead.

\------

_“Frank!”_   


The sound of her scream still echoes in her ears, as she watches Curtis work, her body trembling as he digs another bullet out, this one lodged in Frank’s thigh. She’s got blood on her hands, in her hair, covering a third of her clothes, and across the way she can see Claire Temple sewing up a cut on Matt’s forehead. 

She’d muttered something earlier about _goddamn vigilante triage_ , and through her tears Karen had snorted out a laugh, but the amusement hadn’t lasted. Frank is worse off than everyone else, which isn’t exactly a shock to anyone, even Karen, but there’s something niggling in the back of her mind, something she’s trying not to acknowledge, something that reaches out and slams into her chest when she sees Luke Cage curl a hand around Claire’s shoulder. 

_I didn’t tell him_ , she thinks.

He’s lost too much blood, fought too much fight, there’s barely a patch of skin on him not covered in blood and bruises, and he’d done this for her, because of her, because Fisk had wanted Karen and he wasn’t about to let that happen. 

_You mean **everything** to me,_ she wants to say, wants to whisper into his skin, wants to paint across his eyelids, but he’s barely breathing and he’s lost more blood than a person should be capable of losing, and the bags of it labelled “Micro” in a cooler by the door aren’t going to be enough.

She’s going to lose Frank, and the last thing she ever told him was a lie.

\------

The valerian and honeysuckle in a vase next to her bed are, perhaps, a little overkill, but when she blinks awake, sitting up on the couch, she finds Frank not asleep in that bed but sitting on the floor in front of her, leaning against the couch as he turns the pages of her flower book, careful not to disturb the petals pressed against some of them.

He reaches behind his head with a grimace, no doubt in reaction to the lingering pain in his ribs, curls his fingers around her waist and squeezes, returns to his reading. 

“You’re awake.”  


He hums, presses the back of his head against her thigh, but otherwise seems completely uncaring of anything but the book. 

“I lied,” she tells him, digging a hand into his hair, curling her fingers around his scalp, and the hum returns, deeper this time, but she can’t distract him from the book.   


“Didn’t,” he mutters, like he knows exactly what she means, like he’s ready to argue this with her until he’s blue in the face, like he hasn’t spent the last three days in and out of consciousness, barely alive.  


_Go. I’ll be fine without you!_ she’d told him.

“Frank, forget about the stupid flowers.” He tilts his head to one side, then the other, her nails scritching against his scalp, but he’s nearing the end of the book now, few flowers left, and -  


His finger finds the picture of the valerian, his eyes darting quickly back to the bedside before he reads through the description. He rolls his neck against her, tilting his chin up to watch her. “Yeah,” he says on a nod. “Yeah me too.”

Karen crawls off the couch, too worried about his broken ribs and the arm he dislocated to wait for him to stand, but all her careful movements are pointless when he drags her into his lap and presses his forehead against hers a moment later. “Frank,” she says, feather soft against his busted lip, and he curls both hands around her jaw, nudges her nose with his own, presses his lips against each corner of her mouth before he stares up at her. 

“You remember, what I told you ‘bout Maria?”  


Karen nods, her fingers curled into the hair at the nape of his neck as he stares up at her, and she prepares herself for the weight of what he’s about to tell her.

Frank nods back, eyes red and watery, his teeth wearing at his bottom lip. “I see you, now.”

Karen pulls him close, presses her lips to his own, careful, quiet, soft around the bruises and cuts all over him, and holds him as the tears fall, as he breaks apart in her arms, and when he quiets, hands dragging across her back and her sides, face digging into her neck, Karen catches his gaze and holds it. “You’re home now.”


End file.
